Featured Listing: dressupwho.com

Tell us a little about yourself. What’s your background? How did you start the business?

This website was started in 2007 by the original founder. We acquired the website last year from the founder who took a lot of convincing to sell his “baby”. My background is in advertising and e-commerce. I’m an entrepreneur and investor having established over a dozen successful startups. I’ve exited 3 companies which include another arbitrage business. Currently, my time and financial bandwidth are dedicated to GEOIQ, which is a web-based analytics platform helping advertisers track and optimize their media buying campaigns, and e-commerce company. Aside from these projects, I’m an avid cryptocurrency enthusiast and investor.

How have you marketed the product and where are your customers originating from?

All our traffic is organic (search, direct, and referral through other dress up partners).

Is the asset on your listing owner-operated, how much time does it take to run the business, who else is needed on the team, and what is automated?

Yes, Dressupwho.com is O&O and takes less than 2 hours/week to manage. The site’s operations are nearly fully streamlined. We have trained a virtual assistant to help republish partner games on our site, and our game developer produces roughly 4 games per month. Both our developer and the virtual assistant will transfer to the new owner post-sale. 

The owner spends most of the time tracking analytics (traffic performance) and revenues, as well as publishing the 4 games per month our development team delivers. The publishing of these games can also be outsourced to the development team themselves or the virtual assistant. The latter already has the requisite access to perform this task. The owner should also check up on partner sites to ensure that they are also publishing our games on their sites, this could also be delegated to the VA with proper training and establishing some controls.

What does someone need to do to continue operating the business in its current form?

At present, the only things that need to be done in order to continue operations are:

1. Check the virtual assistant’s work to ensure that he is republishing roughly 100-120 partner games per month on our site.

2. Check partner sites to ensure they are republishing our games.

3. Publish games delivered by our developer.

Can you list a few opportunities for a potential new owner to continue growing the business?

There are definitely several ways in which the new buyer can grow this business:

1. We haven’t spent any time on SEO, although a lot of our traffic is search. With on-page and off-page optimization, targeting specific keywords, traffic can exponentially increase through this medium. 

2. Expanding game distribution partnerships, i.e., republishing more games of partner sites and vice versa will help increase the game syndication to new users, and expand the overall reach of gamers and ultimately, revenue. 

3. The more games that are developed, the more traffic the site will receive. Due to our time constraints with the new projects, we weren’t able to develop more games throughout the year we managed the site, so this is by far the most quantifiable way to grow the site. Onboarding new developers will help with this as well. We work with one developer but can introduce the buyer to a second developer. The buyer could also find other game developers if substantially increased game production is the strategy.

4. Create a login for increased user engagement. Users could have a profile that allows them to select their favourite games and have a page where these can be viewed. 

5. When users create a profile, they could share their email address. Creating a functionality to email all your registered users inviting them to play a new game when it launches is a big opportunity.

6. Walkthroughs should be an entirely separate stream of revenue here. Walkthroughs are essentially video tutorials a user can watch of someone playing a game. Users watch these to ensure they’re doing everything right, or sometimes purely for fun. The largest online gaming sites have this feature, for example, a10.com; click on any game and on the top right, there is a link for the walkthrough. 

There are companies (for example, Tubia.com) that will record walkthroughs of the most popular games for free and provide them to us. Dressupwho.com games can have a link that users can click on to view the walkthrough. While the walkthrough video is being viewed, Dressupwho.com owner earns revenue from display ads around the video, and 60% of the revenue from the video ads within the walkthrough video itself. This one is a no-brainer that we just didn’t have the time to implement but is fairly straightforward to do. 

What has been the evolution of this asset since its launch?

The original founder has seen YOY growth throughout his ownership of this asset. After we took over, unfortunately, we haven’t had the time to publish as many games as we’d like due to time constraints with our e-commerce project. There is a direct correlation between the volume of games published vs the increase in traffic. If the new owner publishes more games to the site, traffic will increase significantly. If we had extra time bandwidth, this site would have continued to grow as it did in the decade prior (this can be seen through GA reports).

How does this business make money? What are the current revenue streams?

This website generates revenue through display and video ads. We currently have partnerships with the following vendors: Snigel, Exponential, Google Adsense, and WeGooAds

What marketing channels are most profitable for the business?

Game partnerships – by expanding these partnerships, the site will see exponential growth due to game distribution.

How does the business currently acquire customers and what is your breakdown for marketing costs?

No marketing costs as game partners reciprocate distribution. We don’t spend money on advertising with dressupwho.com and never have. All traffic has always been organic.

How big is your current team? How many people does it take to run this business?

Our team is currently the developer and a virtual assistant. Currently, it takes 3 people to manage the site, the aforementioned team and the owner. As described above, it is possible to further decrease owner involvement by offloading more responsibilities to the VA and the developer.

What’s the reason for selling your business on Flippa?

We’re selling this business as we’re in the process of expanding our e-commerce operations and need additional capital to buy inventory in bulk. Dressupwho.com is in the top 5 biggest, most preeminent dress up sites in the world. If we didn’t need the capital, we’d hold onto this gem for many years.